Gateway XHD3000 30-inch LCD Monitor Review

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In the past year, we’ve reviewed a couple of 30-inch displays, including the Dell UltraSharp 3007WFP and the HP LP3065. Both offer 2560×1600 pixel resolution and excellent image quality, but are lacking in one key area: video processing.

Most PC displays have some form of video processor built in. While some are more capable than others, their main job is scaling an interpolation of non-native resolutions. Want to run a game at 1680×1050 on your 24-inch, 1920×1200 display? The video processor takes care of that. Toss in video inputs, and the video processor needs to take care of de-interlacing, noise reduction, and other video related features.

Until recently, no video processor for PC displays was really capable of handling the video processing needed to properly scale to 2560×1600. Instead, your PC system’s graphics card was used to handle video processing for existing 30-inch monitors.

That changed on October 4th, when Gateway announced their XHD3000 display, which incorporates a Silicon Optix Realta chipset. Normally used in high end consumer electronics hardware, Silicon Optix video processors offer the horsepower needed to scale and de-interlace both standard definition and HD video streams.

Can this high end, Swiss Army Knife of displays really live up to Gateway’s promises? We’ve put it on the test bench, as well as used it for several weeks, to find out.

First, though, let’s take a quick tour of the key features of the XHD3000. Continued…

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